AUGUSTA — The Skowhegan girls basketball team easily dispatched Messalonskee on Thursday, rolling to a 52-15 victory in the penultimate game of the Capital City Hoop Classic.
Annabelle Morris had a game-high 20 points in the win for the River Hawks, and Allie Frey added 12 points and five rebounds. Skowhegan held Messalonskee without a basket in the second and third quarters.
“I think we just came out and played with a lot better defensive intensity than we’ve played with lately,” said Skowhegan head coach Mike LeBlanc. “We’ve struggled a lot with our intensity and being ready to go, but tonight, we didn’t do that; we came out and played hard.”
Messalonskee stayed with Skowhegan (3-2) for the first five and a half minutes, pulling within a point at 6-5 on an Ashley Mullen 3-pointer. Yet the River Hawks would score the final 12 points of the first quarter before outscoring the Eagles 18-1 in the second to take a 36-6 lead into the break.
Skowhegan then outscored Messalonskee 6-0 in a low-scoring third quarter before the Eagles finally made a field goal courtesy of Addie Hafford. The freshman’s layup with under six minutes to play ended a stretch of more than 20 minutes of game time without a basket for Messalonskee.
“It’s not (something you take for granted) because you never know what you’re going to get from them,” LeBlanc said of the defensive effort against the Eagles, who had averaged 50.7 points per game over their previous three games. “They’ve put up a lot of points in their other games. They’ll win games this season.”
Hafford finished with a team-high six points for Messalonskee, which got a game-high seven rebounds from Ashley Mullen. Mullen failed to score for the Eagles as Morris applied heavy defensive pressure, something LeBlanc said Skowhegan had made a point to accomplish.
Skowhegan pulled away early as Frey made three inside shots as well as a pair of 3-pointers to turn a one-possession game into a full-on rout. LeBlanc has been high on Frey’s ability to take games over, something she did in scoring 12 points in the River Hawks’ 30-1 run to end the half. Messalonskee also had 27 turnovers to Skowhegan’s 13.
“She has the ability to take any game over that she wants to; we just have to keep her in that mindset,” LeBlanc said. “She’s very good; she has been since she came on as a freshman. Now that she’s a junior, she needs to step it up, and that game there, she did.”
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